I've got a netbook running Ubuntu 11.04, a secondary machine that I'm looking to set up as a personal dashboard, sort of like Geckoboard is for business analytics. I just want to see notifications from email, facebook, twitter, etc. in a clean, simple, consistent, and aesthetically pleasing view.

I've looked into Screenlets, but they mostly look awful, and they're not all consistent with each other. At least, the default screenlets that I've seen aren't.

I'm eventually planning on hooking this up to a wall-mounted monitor. Primary purpose is to be able to keep an eye on things while I'm gaming or watching movies full-screen on my primary machine. (Or, y'know, doing work and not wanting to tab-switch constantly to check on everything.)

4 Answers
4

I'll try conky. It gives you infinite configurations and there are scripts for monitoring everything. You can setup the computer to start whit a completely empty desktop just running conky in fullscreen and a nice wallpaper.

The only problem is conky hasen't got a gui to configure, it works based on scripts. But if you google it there's hundreds of people sharing and exchanging conkyrc files. You can take those you like and make a mix until you get what you want.

Full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of http://ducksboard.com/ and we do an aesthetically pleasing hosted dashboard app.

If you're looking for a well thought and clean UI, you might want to give it a try (there's a demo at https://demo.ducksboard.com/demo/). We've tried to do our best to provide a consistent and frictionless experience, but don't take my opinion on it, I'm biased ;) Better give it a try yourself.

We're currently in private beta, but if you ping @ducksboard on Twitter or shoot a mail to hello at ducksboard.com, we'll set you up with an account right away.

I did find Ducksboard after posting this question, and it looks pretty slick. I've submitted my email on the form, but I'll send a hello that way too, thanks :D. I'm graeme.mcb at gmail, just by the way, hah.
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GrayAug 29 '11 at 20:47